Fox Business host Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery revealed her cold, selfish lack of concern for Americans worried about losing their health care under Trumpcare.
“Kennedy” was one of the four conservative pundits on Outnumbered today discussing the failure of Republicans to pass Trumpcare in the Senate yesterday.
The first glimpse of Kennedy’s soul, or lack thereof, was when she went after Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins for wanting “an even bigger government program” than Trumpcare. Kennedy claimed that the VA and Obamacare prove that “big government programs destroy health care.”
Fact check: Most Americans do not think health care has been destroyed by the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). As HuffPost reported, a recent NPR/“PBS NewsHour”/Marist poll found that “just 25 percent of Americans want to repeal the ACA completely. Over 45 percent said they want changes to the ACA that would allow the legislation to do even more.”
But nobody challenged Kennedy’s skewed claim. She next griped that those who are not subsidized “end up paying the entire premiums” of others.
Apparently, Kennedy thinks that if you can’t afford insurance or can’t get it because of a pre-existing condition, you should just go without or go bankrupt trying to get the care you need. But she pretended to care about coverage when she piously declared that there are “a thousand counties” with only one health insurance company left on the exchange.
No one, not even Democratic cohost Marie Harf, mentioned that many of the Obamacare problems are the result of Republican sabotage.
Montgomery acknowledged that Republicans hate the Republican bill and she credited Obama for his “brilliantly written” law that is now “impossible to remove without collapsing healthcare and insurance.”
Wait, wasn’t healthcare already destroyed, according to her?
Harf said that in some states, “Somewhere upwards of 90% of people being treated for things like the opioid crisis are getting that treatment through Medicaid. And these people are legitimately scared, on a county-by-county level, person by person, that that will go away under this bill.”
That is when Kennedy really showed her callousness. Instead of any concern for a viable alternative, she suggested those Americans should not have been receiving help in the first place:
KENNEDY: Well, what is the threshold for being eligible for Medicaid? … That’s something that has to absolutely shift. We have to ask ourselves these fundamental, philosophical questions. What is the function of government? We are expecting too much from it and when we put that much pressure on it, it is going to collapse.
Once again, nobody challenged Kennedy. Instead, Cohost Melissa Francis jumped in to declare that Medicaid is not being cut, that Republicans only want to slow its growth.
Which means that Fox Business host Francis is either deliberately dissembling in the service of rolling back medical coverage for others or she’s spectacularly misinformed.
Watch the war on the poor below, from the June 28, 2017 Outnumbered.
In short, the Right Wing has never believed that healthcare is anyone’s problem but the person who seeks treatment. You need to see a doctor? Fine, go to the doctor. You can’t afford the doctor’s price? Fine, save your own money up til you can afford it. You still can’t afford it? Try the Emergency Room if they’ll take you. Still not getting help? Well, then, that’s your problem, isn’t it?
The last thing the Right Wing ever wanted to see was a situation where anyone in the country would have to pay a single dime for someone else to get medical treatment. At the same time, the Right Wing has never wanted a situation where we had anything like Medicare or Social Security either – which is why they regularly attack those programs as “entitlements” – a term meant to denigrate anyone who uses them as freeloaders who don’t deserve them.
Once the GOP settles on just repealing the ACA and putting off the discussion of how to replace it, you’ll see a LOT more of this argument on Fox News as a way to explain how the ACA was a bad idea in the first place and we’re better off without it.
Anyone who considers that the state’s preservation of wealth and privilege for the few at the expense of the many is in any way acceptable? Beyond contempt.